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WASHINGTON (CNN) - Democratic lawmakers and staffers privately say they're closing in on a broad budget deal that would give President Bush as much as $70 billion in new war funding.

Senator Durbin:

This lead line above from the CNN news story makes me sick.

I and probably 200 million others in this country are sick and tired of spending more money in a foreign country in a week than we spend to feed starving children on our own cities' streets in a year. We're sick and tired of this president throwing good money after bad, good men and women into battle to die, and allowing tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens to die because he wants to protect his and his cronies' oil interests.

More than anything else, though, we're sick and tired of you Democrats buckling under and caving in when it comes to representing the people who foolishly voted you into office. Not a single Democrat has stood up to explain WHY none of you has the backbone, nor apparently the brains, to stand up to a crooked administration nor a guileless GOP party.

WHY has no one stopped Bush from feeding billions of dollars and thousands of U.S. servicemen and women into the shredder that is Iraq?

WHY has no one questioned Bush's flagrant disregard for the Constitutional laws under which all the rest of us must live and by which all the rest of us must abide?

WHY has no one lifted a finger to stop the runaway train wreck that is the Bush-Cheney administration?

Can you please explain to we the people, who voted for you, whom you're supposed to represent, who believed things would change once the Democrats got control of Congress - can you please explain just what it will take to make you and YOUR cronies take action?

What will it take for you to stand up to this adminstration and say, "No more!"? What will it take for you to stand up for the sons and daughters and husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters who are dying every day fighting a pointless war in a country that has no more influence on the world than. . . . well, than the Democrats, and for that matter, the citizens of the United States, have on how this country is governed?

What will it take for even one of you to do the right thing?

Maybe you just don't know what the right thing is.

The only thing "our elected representatives" (representative - what a joke) really seem interested in is holding onto your offices. At the risk of political diminishment, you choose to stay silent, to turn away, to pretend these issues don't exist. You choose the safe and easy way out, to look for others to blame.

Well, that's not who we want representing or governing us anymore.

We the people have had it, and I can assure you, it will be evident in the 2008 election. Yes, the lesser of two evil parties will be voted into office, but with almost a year to go, the citizens of the U.S. have time to work towards booting a good number of you out of office in favor of real people - not politicians - who will take their oaths of office seriously and truly REPRESENT the people whom they serve.

I am sorely tempted to fly to Washington, to camp out on your doorstep, if only for a 60-second opportunity to hear your answers to the questions above.

The most important question I'd like you to answer, though, is. . . . why we have to ask in the first place.

Re. note from Julie who apparently sees a malignant Republican behind every ill that life offers. When did it become appropriate for people to speak in screeds instead of appropriate words? This vacuous blather masquerding as thought it what is wrong with the so called national dialogue.